[Mark Suszko]

The vendors and subs are all “work for hire”; they do not own anything of what they shot for you. However, because you are not a jerk or monster, you have a clause in the contract or deal memo that specifies what little samples they can use from the work, in clip form, for demo or portfolio purposes, as long as the attributions are to your liking. And you can set the time period in which these can go public, so they don’t mess up your marketing.

You want to enable them to show and promote what they contributed, in a limited way, but they are not allowed to re-sell or otherwise market that footage without your express permission. The drone guy, for example, can show a watermarked clip of thirty seconds or so of his work for you… but he can’t re-sell stock footage of that project from any stuff he shot for you. You want this understanding in writing. If he wants a little more money up front for this, that’s normal. He’s giving up any money on the back-end for all his money up front, and everybody that does a “work for hire” gets this.

Whatever you want to do to reward certain crew for things “above and beyond” their work for hire needs the protection of a stand-alone, written deal memo, detailing that you are paying an extra one-time bonus for a specific service performed., e.g.; ” agreed bonus payment for lighting consultation on (date), x amount”, that it confers no additional obligations or additional rights to the materials, and you both sign that while you’re still on the set. Doing it later could become problematic.

[Mark Suszko]

Micro-thin headset boom mics make me cringe, no matter the application. I only accept them on aerobics instructors.

[Mark Suszko]

Countryman lavs are so microscopic, as well as dye-able, hiding those is very easy.

[Mark Suszko]

I’m guessing the still is from LSOH?

[Mark Suszko]

Something I picked up from the theatrical audio experts was hiding the lav capsule in the crease where the ear meets the side of the head. Glasses really hide this well, but you can often still pull this off on a person without glasses, by using a little flesh-colored medical tape to stick the capsule down in that crease, and then the cable is hidden as much as possible in the hair and down inside the collar. Bald guys, I can’t help you, sorry:-)
What this gives you is, the lav-to-mouth distance remains fixed, no matter where the head turns. A chest or lapel-mounted lav needs to be “cheated” to the direction the speaker most points their face, and if they turn away from that direction, you lose gain. On stage, hiding the lav above the forehead, in a wig, is very common.

[Mark Suszko]

Update: solved this in a simpler way: just trashed every related file from the week prior to the bug occurring, and all is well. So it was definitely some kind of corrupted file that kept insisting on itself when invoking the “import” command.

[Mark Suszko]

I think the visible lav question is all about the context. Also, viewer attitudes about lavs have evolved over time, and if they will accept those horrible headset micro-boom things, lavs are no big deal anymore. In theatrical type applications, of course you hide them. For a sit-down interview, or talking to people on social media, certainly in training type media, I don’t think anybody in the viewing audience cares anymore. I’ve worked with lavs all my career, hiding them as well as just hanging them, mostly it was an exigency because we’ve just never had the spare people to dedicate to boom operator, or the nature of the shoot precluded the use of shotguns and booms. Even today, I have a nice telescoping K-Tek and a decent boom mic that spend a year or more in my gear bag, unused, because I use the appropriate tool for the particular situation. And my situations don’t generally need a boom. I can remember the last time I used the boom was, mic’ing a devout Muslim woman. Personal space is a concern there, and so to make a cultural accommodation, she was mic’d with a shotgun and boom. The shotgun can be useful too when you are moving a lot of people thru a pre-composed shot in a short time and you don’t want to waste time mounting and de-mounting a lav; “Stand there, toes on the line, say your thing, thanks, next”.

The big thing that I’ve been dealing with the past couple years is, lav orientation. Nobody knows audio better than the BBC. So when I started seeing them hang lavs on presenters “upside-down” to the way we’d always done it here, I looked into why, and it made a lot of sense that this guarantees your plosives and random breaths don’t pop the mic. When I started trying it out here, our engineer lost his (redacted), could not wrap his mind around the concept that lavs are omnis and that there could be more than one way to orient them when visibly worn; “OMFG, YOU”RE DOING IT WRONNNNGGG!!! WTFBBQ!!11” More than once I’ve had to explain this to people who see it and think it’s a mistake.

Actually, I was doing it more “right”, but old habits are very hard to break.

[Mark Suszko]

This stuff has been my bread and butter for years. I’ve done it every way that it can be done, probably.

The current workflow I use, when it’s long-format, multi-hour stuff we need done cheap, is:

A KiPro hard drive recorder on the laptop’s output, (we have an SDI scan converter and DA so we’re spliced in between the laptop and the projector) with an audio feed from the main camera or mixer. This gives us a powerpoint track with the live audio welded to the slides, as well as any mousing around the presenter needs to show. Recorders and cams set to free-run, time-of-day time code.

Main Camera is a Panasonic P2, also feeding a KiPro for anything longer than 3 hours. The P2 Cards are internal backups for redundancy, in case the KiPro has a failure (rare, but I’m a “belt-and-suspenders” kind of guy, so I always try to have a redundant fail-safe on the most vital elements. It’s saved my butt more than once in the past 2 years.)

A backup wide shot camera: a simple $200 consumer Cannon Vixia. Sometimes it’s a $60 gopro knockoff. This is parked on it’s own tripod or the end of a light stand. Very cheap insurance.

Powerpoint slides also saved to a thumb drive on location

The kipros go into Final Cut Pro or Premiere, and are automatically aligned in a multicam edit, aligned by audio. You can actually edit a show like this slightly faster than real-time, by using the jkl keys to put playback in a faster-than-realtime speed, and either using the function keys to switch “live” on the fly, or laying down markers, then going back to make the cuts. These presentations are very predictable, the slides break down like book chapters, so you can establish a visual rhythm of “slide full-screen, presenter, full- screen, slide-presenter 2- shot, slide detail full, presenter wrapping up the slide, rinse, repeat”. It’s not what I’d call the best instructional design format, not how I’d make a presentation if I was the creator, but it’s making the most of what the clients bring to the party, the way they like it.

I make two identical feeds of the main camera on my timeline, stacked one above the other, one is left normal, the other is manipulated; I adjust the rotation, framing, and cropping so it creates a nice Diptych, with the speaker on one side, and the slide on the other, tilted towards each other like a partly-opened book. A gray background sits behind the diptych on it’s own layer. I add drop shadows to make it nicer. Same with the KiPro iso of the powerpoints with audio: I have a non-modified full-screen layer, and the Effected one that’s been rotated and cropped to match the other half of the diptych.

What that hinged 2-shot does for me is, it gives me visual variety so a viewer isn’t stuck staring at a slide he or she’s already read for too long, and having the human presenter in the frame, with the slide, gives viewers an option to shift their focus from the slides to the presenter on their own terms, as they watch.

You want that shot, for example, when the presenter is adding off-the-cuff remarks that are not written on the slide, but still relate to it or expand on the ideas. This makes my shows much easier on an audience, more engaging and less boring, and there’s little to no extra overhead involved in edit time to get the superior presentation quality.

The 2-shot thing is pre-comped on it’s own layer, so you can treat it as just another camera shot. Simple side-by-side split screens or PIPs can also do this job, but your slides get smaller and harder to read if the two screens are flat or a simple split. The v-shaped diptych, with the slide rotated, gives you a larger slide shot that’s more readable, particularly when clients are overloading the slides with too many lines of small font size.

The thumb drive imported slides are a backup to cover any losses or mistakes. The wide shot from the consumer Vixia helps cover transitions between major sections and gives me a wide shot to cover the few seconds it takes me to zoom and focus onto individuals in the audience doing Q&A. Not having to show the camera slewing around and whip-panning around to the various people and setting focus, makes it look ever so much more professional. It’s also a backup audio recording and overall continuity coverage. I had a recorder fail me one time, temporarily, and the main camera also chose that moment to die, and this wide shot and it’s audio saved the project.

So, using this setup, I have shaved 2-3 days off the turn-around time for these kinds of 4-5-hour gigs, versus the older methods I would have used before, like shooting the PowerPoint with a second camera and using that to guide the lay-back of clean slides over the shots in the timeline, manually. My fastest turn-around on a 5-hour shoot day with this method has been one single 8-hour day, with an hour lunch break, breaking down the edited lectures into stand-alone segments, and rendering those out into mpeg4’s for review and approvals and web posting.

I have done the live-switch thing on-site as well; if you have the luxury of a dedicated director and a dedicated camera op, it can work well. If you’re one-man-banding it, it’s not a fun way to work, and it has potential for big problems if you get behind the power curve on the multitasking.

I’ve done this also many times in the studio, with a pair of locked-off cameras, one covering a wide shot, one, a tight shot, and the PowerPoint source as a third cam. In these cases, I still record camera isos and slide isos with the live sound, so that a blown switch can be covered in a fast edit by matching to time code or the audio track.
you really really want to have the isos as insurance, if you plan to do everything live.

If you’re economizing, you might consider using just one camera, as long as it’s a 4K or better recording, then you can do “punch-ins” in post to make fake closeups as well as tracking shots, your output is 2K. Using the split command on a track and applying the “copy/paste attributes” feature from the first fake close-up you made, makes the other “punch-ins” super fast to execute.

There are cheap external HDMI-based computer video recorders available now, developed to serve the online gamer niche; those are good for recording the slides with live audio, on a lower budget. Check B&H for examples.

Don’t have the budget for the hard drive recorders? You might roll the dice and set a screen recorder going on the PowerPoint laptop, but long, un-interrupted records tend to break down for lack of internal RAM or drive space.

Another possible trick is to put the PowerPoint into “timed rehearsal” mode, and when you save that file, it should be able to generate a MOV file with the slide switch timing matching the live camera shots. But you’d better practice this ahead to make sure it really works.

[Mark Suszko]

Haggis
Kidney pudding
Spotted Dick
Black Pudding
White pudding
Jellied Eels
Toad In The Hole… a corn dog smothered in gravy
Periwinkles
Stargazy pie
Marmite
Laverbread
Scotch Eggs
Rumbledethumps

Some of those might be foods or Harry Potter characters, who can tell the difference. They all look nasty.

[Mark Suszko]

Bernard, it can be ghastly, but with the right materials, they can be delightful. You need to try a freshly-prepared Cozy-Dog one day; accept no substitutes. Corn dogs here are much like fish and chips over there. Not good for you, but good, dig?

Also, considering some of the culinary monstrosities that Great Britain has shown the world, do you really want to “go there”? 🙂